As is Ted Olson, who is standing with furt in bemoaning partisanship.
Yes, that Ted Olson. (snicker)
The revelations of the 9/11 Commission are inevitably going to be politicized. Is this news? If it’s shown that an Administration fucked up, the voters should be entitled to take that into account in making their decision in November.
I don’t really care about whether it’s affecting the poll numbers these days; that’s neither here nor there. The citizenry are free to do what they want with the Commission’s reports, including ignore them.
But the revelations are significant. Take just this story:
That’s arguable, but it makes sense to me. But if it doesn’t make sense to you, the story contained the older news that Tenet and other top CIA officials knew of Moussaoui’s desire to fly a 747 since about August 23 or 24, two and a half weeks before the attacks (and two and a half weeks after the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” via plane hijackings PDB), along with Tenet’s not sharing this info with the Counterterrorism Group, or with the Cabinet at its meeting on terrorism on September 4.
How much of this would we have known without the 9/11 Commission? None. I consider that to be a great service to the country.
The same Ted Olson whose wife was murdered on 9/11? That Ted Olson?
Jeez, how many James A. Bakers are there?
don’t answer that
Anyway, I think you’re right - it makes sense that a Deputy Counsel in 1999 would become Counsel a few years later.
Regardless of who declassified the memo, having it declassified, then not providing it to the commission before testifying, then using it to sandbag Gorelick is a bullshit move I would have expected an Attorney General of the United States to be far above.
Yes, that same ole’ Ted Olson. And if you think that he handed in his dancing shoes as one of the biggest partisans on the block (him and his wife were dedicated leaders of the “get Clinton” movement) when she died, then you are quite mistaken.
Think: Edwin Meese
No, I was quite conscious of it. But while I consider the spin, I also try to see if there is something to it. Ignoring it because it’s from “them” is just as bad as the opposite.
Something along the lines of a FRB is exactly what I’d like to see. And I am not claiming that we should let the administration operate without oversight (“Kissinger” is all that need be said). But while I agree that the commission should have started earlier and been done by now, the illustrations that Welch points to in your article make my point about what we ended up with:
And found two scapegoats while exonerating those at the top, so that it is still seen by many as a whitewash to cover for FDR.
We really got to bottom of that one, didn’t we?
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The Commission’s report was far less critical of NASA than Feynman’s minority report, which was issued as a seperate appendix only after public demand.
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To the extent that it did succeed, I note its composition: mostly engineers, astronauts, and scientists. Not second-rate washed-up pols, owed and owing favors, still hoping to get their names in a history book.
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“I think it’s good to avoid sensationalism, which congressional hearings often produce,” said Acheson.
I would rather see it headed by people who command wider respect – if we needed pols, I have to think that Bob Dole and Sam Nunn would have served, (although I do think Bob Kerrey is OK) – and who are outside the political/governmental complex. An old general or two. Retired FBI. A journalist, a systems analyst, a corporate-communications expert. People that don’t have anything to prove and/or are not spotlight-seekers.
Keep telling yourself that. Is the evidence that the commission is partisan only just now compelling enough to declare it in a thread, or is just now just when that particular spin point became prominent once Republicans realized that the commission was not as laudatory of Bush as heading it with Republicans, conservative Democrats, and ex-colleagues of Rice would have suggested. If anything, the fact that Kean and Mr. Z have been just as hard on people as the Democrats is certainly indication of a more laudable than could have been expected interest in doing this right.
And let me ask you: who appointed those particular sorts of people, and why? Who approved them?
Did you miss the point of Welch’s article? It’s that, no matter WHAT we ended up with, without SOMETHING then we would know very little. No matter how partisan the commission is (and frankly, I don’t think it’s all that partisan), it has still made public reams of information that otherwise would have been kept secret for no more compelling security reason than covering people’s asses.
Not by most historians. Sure, anyone can claim anything as a whitewash.
Well, yes. I don’t think the findings of the commission were that far off from the best the evidence can tell us.
:rolleyes:
Partisan politicians with vested interests in the outcome, such as W. You keep implying that I’m a Republican and hoping to exonerate Bush; I’m not.
I would very much like to see an full accounting for the errors of all Administrations, including this one. And if Bush can be held primarily to blame, I’ll happily hold him down while you strike the blow. But this commission won’t deliver a clear verdict, because the people it is composed of are not career problem-solvers or investigators, but are used to working in an us/them environment where “the truth” or “the facts” are rarely if ever sought for their own sake, but rather are simply tools to be used to advance an agenda. They have years of experience where their entire approach to professional colleagues was based on (D) or (R); you don’t just drop that habit, and putting them on TV (which is how and why I started thinking about it) just makes it worse.
So then just do anything? I agree that a bad solution is better than none; but those are not the only choices. I have explained what I think would be a far better approach and why. Do you wish to address it?
You quote Sniegowski with approval concerning the attack on Pearl Harbor. Should we also assume that you approve, and want us to also accept, his thesis in this long essay that a “right wing pro-Zionist cabal” has captured the White House?
Here is Sniegowski’s own summation of his paper:
“let’s recapitulate the major points made in this essay. First, the initiation of a Middle East war to solve Israeli security problems has been a long-standing idea among Israeli rightist Likudniks. Next, Likudnik-oriented neoconservatives argued for American involvement in such a war prior to the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Since September 11, neocons have taken the lead in advocating such a war; and they hold influential foreign policy and national security positions in the Bush administration.”
The NY Times is running an article showing some of what this commission has helped turn up (so far). Seems like they have discovered quite a lot of useful information, much of which many of us didn’t know about before the commission started its work. Therefore, I don’t think the commission is a “joke”.
Not so much approval per se as to suggest that there were many who did/do suspect the commission scapegoated Kimmel to get FDR off the hook. I used him because A) it was one of the first hits on Google, and B) I thought the fact that he is obviously no fan of Bush would make him more credible in the eyes of those inclined to see this whole issue in purely Bush/anti-Bush terms.
No, I do not support his general thesis.
Of course there were/are “many who suspect” yadda, yadda. I’m amused at people who think the disdain for GW is unique. You should have seen the contempt for FDR in many circles in the US and heard the Eleanor jokes that made the rounds. The fact that she was homely [translation for the Brits: not pretty] and had a funny voice made her an easy mark of a certain type of mind.
If there had been any hint that FDR manipulated things to get us into a war his it just couldn’t have been hidden at the time, or subsequently. Too many of his enemies were alert for such evidence and it should be obvious by now that nothing of that nature can be so well concealed as to never come to light.
Interestingly, the Pearl Harbor commission was put off until after WWII was over. I’m not necessarily saying that this should have been put off, but was an interesting tidbit.
Re: Gorelick
“She is in my mind one of the finest members of the commission, one of the hardest working members of the commission and, by the way, one of the most nonpartisan and bipartisan members of the commission, So people ought to stay out of our business”, [url=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,117173,00.html]Sez Kean
Wow. Quite the non-sequiteur there. And shouldn’t the board be kinda accountable for itself? Or should we investigate the investigation?
Is this some sort of “interesting tidbit” from an alternate universe or something? Or are you taking issue with this post (which links to copies of the original documents):
If you are, you’ll need some, like, further explanation, man.
What’s so hard to understand about what Kean said? Unless you don’t know any of the background, I guess. Kean, a Republican, says that Gorelick, a Democrat, is nonpartisan/bipartisan, and that the the Republican slime-machine should back off.
It’s gone beyond slime-machine tactics into death threat territory.Gorelick gets death threats. Bin Laden would be proud of these guys.
Are you trying to imply that the GOP’s behind these threats?
Well, are they with them or against them?
I think that the default position of the GOP is to be against death threats.
That’s not the necessary implication at all. But the fight has certainly been cast by the Administration in “us v them” terms. And as a real fight to the death. Trouble is they haven’t really adequately defined who the “us” is and who the “them” is.